Opioid Epidemic ‘Engulfing’ U.S. Court Systems: Paper

The huge cash settlements demanded in suits against pharmaceutical manufacturers should be used to help relieve the pressures on courts across the U.S. caused by the opioid epidemic, argues the editor of a major international medical journal.

“In family court systems, opioid addiction’s impact reverberates in the dependency docket as parents rendered incompetent by their addiction forfeit custody of children who then are assigned to relatives, often aging grandparents on fixed incomes, or channeled into foster-home networks, overwhelming limited resource capacity,” he wrote in an editorial essay.

“Increasingly, early childhood courts rescue helpless victims whose mental and physical lives must be re-ordered. Juvenile courts respond to increased incidents of delinquency to finance addiction or to accidents attributable to the functionality losses that addictive episodes and withdrawal trigger.

The epidemic has effectively added a burden to much of the alternative court system that has emerged over the past several decades to diversify defendants from punishment, he added.

Some of these costs can be recovered through settlements pursued against major manufacturers of prescription pain drugs like OxyContin who have been accused of misleading marketing and distribution, Zimmer wrote.

Zimmer noted that this isn’t the first time the U.S. experienced an addiction crisis. Between 1840 and 1920, an estimated 80,000-100,000 Americans were addicted to Chinese Opium. During the 1960s through the 1980s, the heroin epidemic exacted a terrible toll. At its peak in 1970, heroin was responsible for just under 80,000 deaths and “culminated in mass incarceration for non-violent crimes involving the possession, use and distribution of illicit drugs.”

But the scale of the opioid epidemic—and the rising number of deaths—took much of the court system by surprise.

In an effort to develop better approaches at the judicial level, Ohio Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor convened in 2016 a nine-state Regional Judicial Opioid Initiative (RJOI) to develop strategies to provide prompt access to treatment, engage prescription drug-monitoring programs, target interdiction by law enforcement and coordinate with broad-based community action programs. In September 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance provided a $1 million grant to the Ohio Supreme Court to fund the initiative.

But the next challenge is to ensure that governments get some of the money back.

Civil court proceedings against prescription-opioid manufacturers and distributors have been mounted at every level of the court system, but it is not always certain how the funds from winning settlements will be used..

Judge Dan Arron Polster, of the Northern District of Ohio was tasked by the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation to come up with a new framework to approach court procedures when battling opioid manufacturers.

Judge Polster advised circumventing pretrial discovery and lessening “the time consuming quagmire of motions and hearings generated by it.” This, he argued, would open up more time and resources to be spent on “claims resolution through accelerated settlement proceedings.”

The new strategies seem to be paying off, Zimmer wrote—most notably when Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, “publicly announced it would cease its aggressive marketing campaign focused on prescribing physicians and deceptively downplaying the risks of addiction.”

They’ve also since paid Massachusetts General Hospital $3 million in a settlement.

Read Next

In 2016, San Francisco became the first city and county in the nation to reexamine a system of court costs that imposed a crushing burden on tens of thousands of low-income residents. Nearly four years later, it reports impressive results.

Americans are asking if there are better ways of running our justice system, but without the numbers to answer fundamental questions, reformers are operating in the dark, write two specialists in criminological research.

A lawsuit charges that the Trump administration violated protesters' First Amendment rights in Washington, D.C. The president approvingly tweets a letter from his former lawyer calling the demonstrators "terrorists."

The partial shutdown of immigration courts during the COVID-19 health crisis has derailed final hearings for tens of thousands of individuals, and is likely to postpone the decisions about the fate of many more for months, if not years, while they wait in detention, according to data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

×

Thanks for reading The Crime Report! You have free article(s) remaining. Subscribe for unlimited access.